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Once a year I produce a one-time print run of holiday cards with a winter-themed image, and ... it's that time again. This singular King Penguin from St Andrews Bay on South Georgia Island overlooks a warm misty sunrise and 150,000 of his closest friends....

I recently commented on Facebook about just how much technology has "moved the bar" of what is widely considered to be acceptable technical quality in an image, and I mentioned I'd been looking at a particular image, this is it. I'd been preparing to shoot away from where I expected the sun to rise, and had to quickly regroup when this sun pillar appeared in the other direction.

I had no idea what I was looking at at the time, this sunrise led me to investigate all sorts of optical phenomena, and the amazing ways they're created, I still have my copy of Rainbows, Halos and Glories by Greenler, and understanding some of the crazy stuff that happens to create a vertical pillar of light in the sky, for me, makes the whole thing even more amazing, rather than less.

The resolution of the high-end drum scan I had made of the slide is not, on the face of it, that different in resolution than what my D800E produces today, but the level of film grain seems pretty bad today, more like I'd expect at ISO 6400 than ISO (err, ASA) 50. A pixel-peeping inspection also shows that my optics today are a lot nicer than what I was using at the time.

Still, I doubt that really will change most people's enjoyment (or lack thereof) of this image, technical standards come and go, but images are so much more than technical minutae.